Isotopic analyses of prehistoric human remains from the Flinders Group, Queensland, Australia, support an association between burial practices and status
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Isotopic analyses of human remains have the potential to alter our understanding of prehistoric lifeways and migration in Australia, but very few such analyses have been conducted in the country to date. Here, we report the first regional multiproxy isotope study of pre-contact human remains from Australia. We obtained δ13Ccollagen, δ15Ncollagen, δ18Obioapatite, δ13Cbioapatite and 87Sr/86Sr isotope values from three complex interments and two simple beach burials from the Flinders Group of Islands, Queensland. The study had two goals. One was to assess how the diets of the individuals compared to those of pre-contact populations elsewhere in the region. The other goal was to test the hypothesis that burial type was indicative of local/non-local status. We found that the individuals’ diets were diverse and included a relatively high percentage of low trophic level foods. With regard to the difference in burial practices, we found those afforded complex burials had grown up in the Flinders Group, while those given beach burials likely grew up away from the islands. These results highlight the intricacies of the lives of the Indigenous Australians who inhabited the islands and inform our understanding of their pre-contact diet and mobility. The results also suggest that multiproxy isotope studies may be able to aid with the repatriation of unprovenanced remains of Indigenous Australians.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".